Bruce MacDonald’s PONTYPOOL is still one of my favourite genre films from the past decade or so, so I was expecting good things from his new one, HELLIONS. Sadly, I found it really thin — monofilament thin, basically an extended dream sequence in which none of the horror — pregnant teen tormented by supernatural trick-or-treaters — registers because none of it feels real. Nor does it feel like a real dream or a real psychotic break. The film spends about ten minutes in reality setting up its characters, and the rest goes to show that good actors are helpless without strong writing to give them material to work with. Nice to see Robert Patrick, though, amusingly still dressed as a cop.

Peter Bogdanovich’s SHE’S FUNNY THAT WAY references his previous movies WHAT’S UP DOC, NOISES OFF, and THEY ALL LAUGHED, or at least reminds me of them, and it features actors from throughout his long career, including Cybill Shepherd and Tatum O’Neal and Colleen Camp. More substantial roles are taken by Austin Pendleton and George Morfogen, who both appeared in WHAT’S UP DOC? The leads are Imogen Poots and Owen Wilson. But a hot newcomer named Jennifer Anniston walks off with the picture.

Developed under the title SQUIRRELS TO THE NUTS, the film centres on theatre director Wilson’s habit of quoting Charles Boyer’s “nuts to the squirrels/squirrels to the nuts” speech from Lubitsch’s CLUNY BROWN. Wilson quotes this speech to the escort girls whose services he employs, before gifting them with large sums to help them turn their lives around. So here’s a character who relies on escort girls for company (though he’s married) but likes to retire them so they can earn a living some better way. Odd, when you think about it.

My worry going in was that this was going to be autobiographical — Bogdanovich co-wrote it with his partner Louise Stratten. There are lines early on about printing the legend and rewriting history to make it more glamorous. So the fear was, is this going to be an attempt to rewrite the tragic fate of Dorothy Stratten? Is the world ready for STAR 80, the romcom?

(Playmate-turned actress Dorothy Stratten was romanced by Bogdanovich, starred in one of his movies, and was horribly murdered by her ex-husband. Bogdanovich then began a longterm relationship with her sister, Louise. The press accused him of having plastic surgery performed on Louise to make her more closely resemble the late Dorothy. A juicy VERTIGO tale of necrophilia — the truth appears to be that Louise needed dental work and Bogdanovich paid for it. Not actually that sinister.)

The urge to recreate a story with an intolerable ending and make it sweet is an understandable one, so the only question would be whether the film succeeds or if the result is just creepy. In fact, due to the charm of Poots and Wilson and the rest (Bogdanovich’s skill with actors remains truly impressive), the movie is sweet and likable and fun. The farce writing isn’t as tight, as logical or as surprising as it could be, and there are a few missteps — you can’t get a laugh by having a young lead punch spry but septuagenarian Pendleton — that wouldn’t even have been funny in 1972 — but there’s also a lot or warmth and joy. But the person who actually makes it funny is Anniston, playing the world’s worst shrink.

Filling in for her respected mom (Joanna Lumley, whose only onscreen appearance is during her credit in the end titles), Anniston’s character is constitutionally unsuited to her job: foul-tempered, intolerant, judgemental and compulsively indiscreet, she blunders hilariously through her every scene. The stuff with her boyfriend isn’t so great — we’ve seen Madeline Kahn do the nagging shrew bit, and MK can never be surpassed, but the shrink schtick is persistently a scream. Keep an eye on this Anniston person, she’ll go far.

Defiantly old-fashioned, the movie looks back warmly at Hollywood history, of which Bogdanovich’s earlier films are now part. I don’t know if it can possibly be a success in the modern marketplace. But that isn’t my concern. I liked it. I like Bogdanovich for making it.

At the Hollywood Canteen movie bookstore, my guide to the fair city of Toronto, Milos Tolmin, strikes a dramatic pose. He also tweets as @HogtownSerb — I suggest you follow him.

Hollywood Canteen is like paradise to me, but the prices are reasonable, and as a Scotsman that distresses me. So regretfully I only purchased —

Each Man in His Time, the autobiography of Raoul Walsh, which I didn’t even know existed. Never seen a copy. You just know Uncle Raoul is going to have some good stories!

Raoul as Pancho Villa. (Ladies! Restrain yourselves!)

Three More Screenplays by Preston Sturges. These volumes are always expensive, so to find one at a reasonable price was a welcome surprise. This one contains scripts for THE POWER AND THE GLORY, EASY LIVING and REMEMBER THE NIGHT, films wholly written by P.S. but which he did not direct, so I expect the variations from page to screen will be illuminating. Who wants to read a script that feels like a transcript of the finished film?

Despite what you might see as my restraint in Hollywood Canteen, I did actually go berserk in Toronto’s used bookstores (w hich are in decline thanks to the internet, but still impressed me mightily). BMV books on Bloor Street, just five minutes from my hotel, has a great assortment of film books in the basement, at knockdown prices, so you could hardly expect me to leave without an assortment of literature that threatened to break small bones in my feet every time I hoisted my luggage. I came away with —

Screenwriter: Words Become Pictures by Lee Server. I’ve read too many screenwriting books, in search of the non-existent secret of success, but I love interviews with screenwriters (often more articulate and more amusingly embittered than directors or stars) and this one profiles such luminaries and subluminaries as Charles Bennett, A.I. Bezzerides, Allan Scott and Curt Siodmak. I bet I can get some good quotes from it for here.

An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood by Neal Gabler. As guest of th Toronto Jewish FIlm Festival in company with NATAN, I felt I should. It looks great!

Secret Lives of the Great Filmmakers by Robert Schnakenberg, illustrated by Mario Zucca. Gossip — fairly scrupulously presented, so much of it is likely true. I figured Fiona would enjoy this one along with me.

Film Scripts Four. This one collects A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, DARLING and THE BEST MAN. $4.90 = just over £2, and believe it or not I hesitated, mindful of my baggage allowance.

The Platinum Years, photographs by Bob Willoughby (text by Richard Schickel, whose The Disney Version I was much tempted by). This great doorstop coffee table book of on-set stills from late sixties Hollywood productions is the biggest item I came away with, but was still only $9.91, an odd price but a more-than-fair one. Seduced by the favourable exchange rate and Richard Lester’s persona recommendation (he thought the PETULIA pics the best ever taken on one of his sets), I lugged it home.

Dylan Thomas The Complete Screenplays. The script of THE DOCTOR AND THE DEVILS taught me more craft than Robert McKee ever could, so I’m anxious to try the rest. I have seen and enjoyed the rare THREE WEIRD SISTERS and NO ROOM AT THE INN so a script comparison should be interesting. TD&TD has been unsuccessfully filmed, twice, once by a late friend of Milos.

Milos insisted I should get something Canadian, and bought me, over my spluttered protests, a study of Bruce MacDonald’s HARDCORE LOGO, a film I’ve been meaning to see. I interviewed Mr. MacDonald at the time of PONTYPOOL and found him as appealing as his movie.

At a few other stores, I supplemented my (barely) mobile book repository with —

KOPS AND CUSTARDS The Legend of Keystone Films (A BOOK) by Kalton C. Lahue and Terry Brewer. Am particularly interested because of current researches into Mabel Normand, and I couldn’t resist a book with that parenthesis, or with this sentence inside: “Joe Jackson was an inveterate joker, who worked almost exclusively with electricity.”

An Illustrated History of the Horror Film, by Carlos Clarens. Based on his appearance in Agnes Varda’s LION’S LOVE, I would nominate Mr. Clarens as cinema’s cutest critic, but what drew me most was this image from THE WIZARD, a lost film from 1927. George Kotsonaros and Gustaf Von Seyffertitz.

Trap for Cinderella by Sebastien Japrisot, a French novelist of mainly crime fiction, all of whose novels have been filmed.

I also rather wish I’d bought a book collecting articles from Image, just for a rather moody photo of Joe Martin. Mr Martin was that unusual person, an orangutan movie star, though he was often credited as “Joe Martin the Chimp.” I’d never heard of him, but it turns out I’d seen him, opposite Max Linder in SEVEN YEARS BAD LUCK. In THE ADVENTURES OF TARZAN, the IMDb has him credited as “Man in Ape Suit,” which confuses me as he#s definitely the real deal. Does the film feature a man in an ape suit played by a real ape? If so, it is boldly reversing Hollywood tradition.

Read Joe’s bio here! (Caution: it is a deeply horrible, tragic story. It has so many elements of Poe I really hope it isn’t true.)

Not much to add to the gleeful hubbub surrounding Edgar Wright’s adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD. A rare film which takes faithfulness to its source as a call to have fun rather than stifle invention, it’s also one of the few movies that really works for me in terms of juggling sort-of-real characters with personalities and issues, and awesome fight scenes where people get exploded. There’s no sense of a mismatch at all, you don’t worry about the death side of things, you just accept that the mild mayhem is some kind of metaphor, and nobody really gets hurt within the world of this film.

Taking his cue from the graphic novel/s, Wright plays games, literally, with cinema, cheerfully eating up anime and comic book and video game techniques. It makes me curious to see what he’d do with 3D, since his showcasing of technique for the sheer hell of it makes self-consciousness a virtue. Also, it’s very funny.

Wright has always had a lovely sense of comic timing, and his hyperkinetic style actually works hand-in-hand with that. The sharp cut following Michael Cera’s reaction to the line “Bread makes you fat,” — a single, horrified, “What?” — is made retroactively funnier by the abruption of the edit following fast on the heels of the line. In a split second, your brain is reprogrammed to upgrade the line from amusing to hilarious.

Cera is of course delightful, but so is everyone. My new conversational opener for after a film viewing with a friend is “Who was your favourite?” and it works very well with this movie [Maybe wouldn’t be so helpful with something like SECRET HONOR] I asked Fiona, “Who was your favourite?” “What?” “Who was your favourite?” “Oh. Girl drummer.” An instinctive reaction to a good bob. And then, “And gay guy.” My favourite is Ellen Wong as Knives Chao, because everything she does is cute and funny. But it’s a tough call, because there’s a whole trench-full of cute funniness in the flick.

As one who’s gone on the record with a deep, almost sexual admiration for Cera, I felt uncertain about his darker hair coloring here, and Wright does a lot of profile and three-quarter views of his star, which makes him less beautiful, less a Starman and more a 21st Century Sterling Holloway. But that ain’t bad.

Is Scott sitting on a swing in the snow a reference to Kurosawa’s IKIRU? It seems like it might be. Or it might be a reference to Bruce MacDonald’s THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS, which likewise has teenage issues, split screen and Canada as sub-topics. Two references that seem fairly certain are the use of the hypnosis sting from Mike Hodges’ FLASH GORDON, and the appearance by the Monster from the Id from FORBIDDEN PLANET. What’s he been doing with himself in the last fifty years, anyhow?